RE: Difference between RPG III and RPG IV with CHAIN

This should really be on the RPG list.

Both of those statements work in RPG IV. It's hard to say what didn't work because I don't quite understand the problem you're explaining. My guess is that the issue resulted from a confused use of BIFs. CHAIN uses %found and can turn %eof off, but will not turn %eof on. READ uses %eof and not %found. (I apologize if you already know this.)

Style choice: I would never use a Chain in a loop (unless the situation in particular called for it - I can't think of an example although I'm sure there is one, and it would be the exception to the rule).

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of jmmckee
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 4:00 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Difference between RPG III and RPG IV with CHAIN

Where I work, training is something of a dirty word.

To read multiple records using a partial key in RPG III, I do this:

xxkey chain xxfmt LR
*INLR doweq *OFF


xxkey reade xxfmt LR
enddo


On a project a few years ago, written in RPG IV, that code did not work.

The only way we found to make it work was to do this:

xxkey setll xxfmt
xxkey reade xxfmt
dow not %eof(xxfile)


xxkey reade xxfmt
enddo


Doing a CHAIN to position and read the first record when multiple records were read just went to end of file, as I recall. Been too long.

Were we doing someting wrong that caused the RPG IV code to fail? This has really been bugging me for a long time. I couldn't find a reason for the bizarre behavior in my searching. It >may< have been an error when only one record with the matching subkey was found. Again, I just don't remember.

John McKee